Ars reviews Adobe Lightroom 3

Lightroom 3 may not be knee-deep in new features, but the Camera RAW 6 stuff …

Lightroom 3 vs. Aperture 3

What would a review be without a little drama? While a comparison between Lightroom 3 and Aperture 3 is a moot point for Windows users, I think it's useful because the driving innovative force of these programs is the fact that they're competing directly against each other for the same types of users. The two applications are making a lot of tit-for-tat progress—version 3 of both applications added arbitrary-point curves and better high-noise RAW conversion, but let's do a quick rundown of where each trumps the other.

Lightroom's strengths:

Feels snappier on all hardware (it doesn't rely on a fast GPU so it's better suited to laptops)

Aperture's strengths:

Best very noisy image conversion

Places geotagging and Faces social metadata tagging

Has video trimming features (Lightroom 3's video support is just bad—it opens files in an external video app for playback.)

Aperture 3's curves are bigger, can be zoomed and have individual channel support so they are better than Lightroom 3's.

When most people talk about one program vs. the other, they usually mention speed, and Adobe has further improved Lightroom's performance in version 3. So the speed factor continues to separate the two applications. Apple bet heavily on the GPU with Aperture, and it's still not clear that this is anything but a burden because, even at version 3, performance is still Aperture's weak point. What Aperture lacks in speed, it makes up for in features like geotagging and facial recognition. These may be of limited appeal to busy pros, but these programs have a large prosumer user base that values things like this. But I'd venture a guess that automatic distortion and chromatic aberration correction appeals to a wider group of both prosumers and professionals. The only catch is that this is also in Photoshop CS5, so you don't need Lightroom to access them.

For me, it's all about image quality and speed which, judging from the RAW tests, favors Lightroom 3. I'm lucky enough to have both programs to use in cases when one is better than the other, and I find Aperture's noisy image conversion much better than Lightroom 3's. So, even if my library was hosted in Lightroom, I can see myself taking trips to Aperture to get the best out of a difficult, noisy image like this one that I recently used for a 12" sleeve. If you're a wedding photographer, you want to work quickly on less arty images that have less noise, so that definitely favours Lightroom because of its speed advantage and automated distortion fixes. The two programs can appeal to different users—Aperture 3's Places geotagging is pretty great, and is not just something that appeals to consumers—but Lightroom 3 has made strides in conversion quality and speed that Apple will need to match.

Conclusion

This review is relatively short becauses there's not a lot of new ground to cover in Lightroom 3, but the new and updated features are significant enough to make this a very compelling upgrade. Problems are minor, and I would think that the small curves dialog could be addressed in a point update—the hard work is already done. Adobe has capitalized on Lightroom's strengths and worked hard to fix its weaknesses, and all that effort has clearly paid off.